By coincidence, this week's issue of New Scientist has an interview with
"Wayback's inventor, Brewster Kahle". You can access it online at
www.newscientist.com <http://www.newscientist.com>
Peter Elliott
Senior Keeper
Department of Research & Information Services
Royal Air Force Museum
Hendon
London
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-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Barry [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 12:19 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Electronic retention
In a message dated 11/21/02 12:46:42 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine, <http://www.archive.org/>,
has been trawling the web since 1996, collecting copies of
websites that do not specifically exclude link-crawling robots. Their
100+ terabytes of holdings include, for example, multiple copies of
www.rickbarry.com since Oct. 1999 and www.llgc.org.uk since
Dec. 1996 (not a pretty site).
This is all true; however, we should not mistake this for an appropriate way
to deal with organizational web archives. As great as Wayback is, it is not
entirely unlike the IT version of "archiving", ie, it is more like a backup
of a site than what we would call a trustworthy recordkeeping system -- most
especially when it comes to sites that carry out e-bus or e-gov
transactions. Wayback also, it seems, has its own small shortcomings. Last
year it captured 10 snapshots of rbarry.com. This year it has captured none,
I suspect because I have changed the url from rbarry.com to mybestdocs.com
and it hasn't made the first hit on the new url to get it into its directory
yet.
Regards,
Rick Barry
mybestdocs.com
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